[jira] Commented: (INFRA-1387) Have Metalinks (XML format listing mirrors and checksums for files) for downloads

["Joshua Slive (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1387?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12537165 ] 

Joshua Slive commented on INFRA-1387:
-------------------------------------

There is nothing to stop any project from implementing this for their downloads using the exiting templating system. It should be relatively easy. (End the template filename in --xml.html to get the application/xml content-type set.)

Personally, I don't see a huge benefit. We already select local mirrors for our downloaders and we verify reachability frequently, so retries shouldn't be necessary very often. And I find download accelerators to be typically annoying and badly-behaved. I'd prefer not to encourage them. (If it is automatically checking the file integrity against the md5 hash, that would be an advantage, however.) Any statistics on what percentage of apache downloaders use one of these tools? I'd guess it is pretty low. 

> Have Metalinks (XML format listing mirrors and checksums for files) for downloads
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: INFRA-1387
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1387
>             Project: Infrastructure
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>      Security Level: public(Regular issues) 
>          Components: Website
>            Reporter: Ant Bryan
>            Priority: Trivial
>
> Metalink ( http://www.metalinker.org/ ) is an XML format used by download apps, and contains the ways to get a file (mirrors/P2P) along with info for automatic error detection/recovery (checksums) and other metadata.
> It can simplify the download process for the user, since they don't have to manually try a bunch of servers that could be down, can automatically use local mirrors first, and can repair downloads.
> About 15 download managers & P2P apps support it so far, including aria2, DownThemAll! (Firefox extension), KGet2 (part of KDE4), and popular DMs on Windows and OS X like GetRight, Free Download Manager, Orbit, wxDownload Fast, Speed Download, and TheWorld web browser. Over 20 other distros use Metalink, along with OpenOffice.org, cURL, and LugRadio.
> Here's what a metalink file (httpd-2.2.6.tar.gz.metalink) looks like:
>   <file name="httpd-2.2.6.tar.gz">
>    <verification>
>     <hash type="md5">d050a49bd7532ec21c6bb593b3473a5d</hash>
>    </verification>
>    <resources>
>      <url type="http"
>           location="us"
>           preference="90">
>       http://apache.oregonstate.edu/httpd/httpd-2.2.6.tar.gz
>      </url>
>      <url type="http"
>           location="us"
>           preference="100">
>       http://www.axint.net/apache/httpd/httpd-2.2.6.tar.gz
>      </url>
>    </resources>
>   </file>
> (And so on for all 50+ mirrors).

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